MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2025
And so, the end of the shutdown came: Should ten Democrats have decided to vote to stop the shutdown? We'll link you to a pair of possible answers.
In this column for the New York Times, Ezra Klein says he wouldn't have voted to end the shutdown, but by the end of his piece, he takes a nuanced view of the matter:
What Were Democrats Thinking?
[...]
More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. I want to give them their due on this: They are hearing from their constituents and seeing the mounting problems, and they are trying to do what they see as the responsible, moral thing. They do not believe that holding out will lead to Trump restoring the subsidies. They fear that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster...They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.
If I were in the Senate, I wouldn’t vote for this compromise. Shutdowns are an opportunity to make an argument, and the country was just starting to pay attention. If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear. And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.
But it’s worth keeping this in perspective: The shutdown was a skirmish, not the real battle. Both sides were fighting for position, and Democrats, if you look at the polls, are ending up in a better one than they were when they started. They elevated their best issue—health care—and set the stage for voters to connect higher premiums with Republican rule. It’s not a win, but given how badly shutdowns often go for the opposition party, it’s better than a loss.
Ezra would have continued the shutdown even as people suffered. On the other hand:
What happened isn't a win, he said, but it's better than a loss. That's the way the column ended.
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said there was nothing more Democrats could hope to get out of an extended shutdown. He said they had already won the standoff by giving the electorate a chance to see President Trump behaving an undisguised ogre with respect to nutrition assistance and to subsidies for health insurance.
We're inclined to agree with that view. Thanks to Mediaite, here's part of Scarborough's discussion this morning with Senator King (I-Maine).
Some people are responding to the "cave" by the ten Democrats with a great deal of fury. We would offer this:
Those of us in Bue America bought this deal when we did the various things that made Election 2024 turn out the way it did. When we kept pretending that the southern border was closed. When we kept failing to explain what was occurring at the border. When we kept pretending that something seemed to be wrong with President Biden.
When we kept pretending that complaints about inflation and the cost of living were delusions on the part of the voters. When we kept pushing for some of the social justice issues which, rightly or wrongly, went well beyond anything that made sense to a large percentage of American voters.
When we kept pushing and pushing and looking for ways to get Candidate Trump locked up. We kept ignoring the interests of regular people as we invested ourselves in that project.
Under the circumstances, it's a miracle that Candidate Harris came as close as she did. It's a marker of how unpopular Candidate Trump actually was—but we still managed to get him elected to the White House again, and he even emerged with narrow majorities in the Senate and the House.
No, the border wasn't secure—and everyone knew that but us. In the process of pretending otherwise, we created the narrow but absolute power imbalance we're still stuck with today.
Democrats still have no particular power to stop the ogre-adjacent behavior being displayed by President Trump. Also this:
To this day, no one has tried to explain the policy at the southern border during the Biden years. No one has tried to explain, and no one has tried to apologize for all the arrogant dissembling in which we Blues were involved.
At this point, Blue America needs to find a voice the public will trust to explain the current situation involving the way the president is throwing lower-income people under the bus and into the cold. (We've advised you to pity the child with respect to the behavior of the current president.)
It will have to be a voice the American public will be inclined to trust. It might even help if it's a voice which can explain, and perhaps apologize for, our own tribe's unwise behavior during the past however many years.
The border was open and everyone knew it. We Blues were saying that it was secure. Everyone knew it wasn't secure—everyone except us!
Ezra's willing to let the suffering continue. Ezra is clearly a good, decent person. Is it possible that he's imaginably being a tiny bit cavalier, or that it might almost look that way to other good, decent people?
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. In our view, this isn't the easiest call.
